This Santa Margarita boy, whose parents asked not to use his name, played for the Pop Warner Stallions last year and was targeted by the Tustin Red Cobras.

The Tustin Red Cobras led by head coach Darren Crawford went undefeated during the 2011 regular season. The Register blurred the back of a jersey to protect the identity of the player because of his age.

Members of the Tustin Cobras Junior Pee Wee Division football team following its 34-0 win over San Bernardino in 2011. The coaches in the back row are from left, Paul Bunkers, Darren Crawford, Pat Galentine, Rich Bowman, John Zanelli, Markus Remigio and Mike McClain.

This still image from a video shows a helmet-to-helmet collision where an 11-year-old Santa Margarita player goes down. The stadium announcer says, "A big hit" with emphasis on big. The Santa Margarita player is seen lying on the ground. The Tustin player who made the hit tries to help him up, but the Santa Margarita player wobbles and falls again.

At least two 2011 Tustin Red Cobras coaches, head coach Darren Crawford and defensive coordinator Richard Bowman, shown above, established a program to pay cash to players for the hardest hits in a game and more money for knocking a player out of a game.

The 2011 Tustin Red Cobras, one of America’s elite youth football teams, put bounties on the heads of opposing players. This is what a former coach and three players emphatically told us. They were specific about names, places and statements the top coaches made. One parent told us his son got cash for a hard hit.

Three other Red Cobras coaches said just as emphatically there was no bounty program. To believe these three coaches, you also have to believe that five people made up a fantastical story out of whole cloth because they were “disgruntled.” Perhaps the back story will help you sort it out.

Last spring, I heard a rumor about excessive violence being encouraged by coaches for the Red Cobras, which a few months earlier had gone to the Pop Warner championship tourney in Florida. On Mother’s Day, I met three men at a Tustin restaurant and they laid out a story that, if true, sets a new low for win-at-all-costs mentality in youth sports.

Two were fathers who had heard about the bounties from their sons after the season. The third man, John Zanelli, said he had firsthand knowledge because he was a Red Cobras assistant coach. The problem was, none of them wanted to go on the record or allow their sons to. I told them we wouldn’t publish otherwise.

Zanelli said he’d think about going on the record. I told him that while he was doing so, it might be helpful if he committed to paper a chronology of events. He did, and while I didn’t see it for several months, he circulated it among some Pop Warner parents. From there it found its way to the national Pop Warner office in Pennsylvania. Zanelli’s chronology is 6½ pages long, single-spaced. A good portion of it deals with grievances other than the bounties.

The chronology in hand, national Pop Warner asked Orange Empire Conference officials to look into it. During this investigation six parents and four players told an O.E.C. commissioner, Robert T. “Bobby” Espinosa, and one other official about the bounties. Espinosa didn’t believe them.

Zanelli told me that Espinosa told him that he didn’t believe a bounty program existed because two of the players who allegedly got money wouldn’t talk to him.

Those players didn’t talk to Espinosa, Zanelli said, because of disagreements between their respective parents about whether their sons should. Instead, in two cases, the players were each represented before Espinosa by one parent. Zanelli heard one of those two parents tell Espinosa directly that his son actually received cash for a hard hit. But this statement, and the statements of four other players with firsthand knowledge (and Zanelli), apparently were not enough to convince Espinosa there had been a bounty program.

This greatly upset Zanelli and some of the Red Cobras parents who had talked to Espinosa. Some felt they’d put their sons at risk by telling the truth – and now they were not being believed. Zanelli thinks that Espinosa was fearful of even acknowledging there was a bounty program because it would be devastating for Pop Warner, especially in light of the national outrage over the New Orleans Saints bounty scandal.

Meanwhile, other internal Tustin Pop Warner politics were creating more bad blood in town. The Tustin league repeatedly blocked Zanelli and other dissident Red Cobras parents from forming their own team, which they wanted to do because they were so disgusted with the bounty program and other activities on the Red Cobras.

During all this nastiness, last spring, Zanelli encountered one of the Tustin Pop Warner officials at a Little League field. There is a dispute about who said and did what to whom, but it resulted in Zanelli being suspended from Pop Warner.

Against this backdrop, Zanelli two weeks ago finally agreed to tell his story on the record. What seemed to make the difference now was that Zanelli and the like-minded parents had run out of options for getting some redress of their grievances through Pop Warner.

When head coach Darrren Crawford and then-defensive coordinator Richard Bowman claim Zanelli and the parents are making up the bounty program because they are disgruntled, this is what they are referring to: Zanelli was suspended, and he and the dissident parents initially didn’t get their way when they tried to form their own team.

Certainly, this might have contributed to finally making them willing to talk to us or have their sons sign a statement. But would it compel them to conspire among themselves to fabricate such a wild tale in the first place – and enlist their kids? Five sets of parents?

Three of the players agreed to talk to us after we assured them they wouldn’t be named, which is our policy when dealing with minors who may suffer harassment if they are identified as witnesses. I met with Zanelli and one other parent about three weeks ago. Zanelli spoke for attribution this time, and repeated what he told me in May.

I then scheduled interviews with three players.

As I was relating this development to my editor a couple of weeks ago, reporter Keith Sharon overheard. Until recently, Keith was a sports editor. Turns out, he knew one of the Santa Margarita players who had been targeted. He offered to contact the players’ parents. With Keith’s knowledge and the story getting bigger, my editor and I decided it would be a good idea for Keith to work on it with me.

Zanelli had supplied me with signed statements by two players detailing the existence of a program. (Those statements had also been given to Pop Warner.) But I wanted to look players in the eye and have them tell me in their own words what they saw and heard.

This they did. Keith and I met them at the Tustin restaurant at 2 p.m. last Sunday.

All three players, who are now 11 or 12, said they clearly remember when they first heard about the bounty program from Crawford. Two said they heard him introduce it at a practice; the other player said he first heard Crawford talk about it at a film session. As for actual payments, one player said, “I saw the (other) coaches give Coach Crawford the money and he gave it to (the player).” They all said they heard about the program multiple times from Crawford and Bowman.

We talked for more than an hour. The players’ fathers didn’t interrupt or try to put words in their mouths. Then, on Friday, the father of a fourth player told Keith that his son actually received cash.

Keith also tracked down parents of kids allegedly targeted in the bounty program. Reggie Scales’ reaction was, “How the hell are you going to allow this in Pop Warner?” It’s ridiculous. It infuriates me. My son could have been damaged for life.”

It fell to me to contact the accused coaches.

“Absolutely not, that is ridiculous,” Crawford said when I asked whether there had been a bounty program. “I’ve been cleared in three investigations. It’s amazing what disgruntled parents will put their kids through.”

He told me that on Monday. On Friday, after we’d talked to several more parents and officials and word was getting around town that we were going to publish a story, Crawford called Keith. This time, he said his memory of events was hazy but some opposing players had been targeted and that he might have given one of his players money, but that the targeting and the money were not related and thus did not amount to a bounty program.

As for Bowman, at first he told me, “I don’t even know what you are talking about.” Then he said Zanelli made up the allegations in retribution for being suspended himself.

“So there was no bounty program?” I asked Bowman.

“Never, dude, never,” he said.

“So the three players we talked to are lying?”

“Absolutely lying,” he said. “If those kids are saying money was paid, they are absolutely lying. … There’s no way we’d pay to hurt anybody.”

As to the “three investigations” that Crawford said cleared him, the first two were conducted by Tustin’s own board or its representative and, according to Zanelli, did not involve the bounty program. Espinosa and the O.E.C. conducted the only Pop Warner probe into the bounties we’ve been able to find.

I called Espinosa. He said he interviewed several Tustin players and parents but found “no evidence” of a bounty program. Keith and I, remember, had just interviewed three of the four players Espinosa talked to, all of whom unequivocally told us there had been a bounty program and that they had told that to Espinosa.

When I asked Espinosa what those players had told him, he said, “You know what? I’m going to end this conversation now,” and he hung up.

Espinosa and I had chatted some years ago after he was charged with embezzling $50,000 from the Fullerton Pop Warner league in 2002 and 2003. Espinosa pleaded no contest and was ordered to pay restitution of $16,875. He did so, and court records show that what had been a felony was reduced to a misdemeanor and, finally, in 2010, to an expungement.

Pop Warner must have been impressed. It elevated him to a commissioner.

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